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Thursday, August 9, 2012

Hypocrite Harper's False Claims (Lies)

The following is a re-post of an open letter on Facebook by Dianne Varga.

She makes some really good points. Emperor Harper Hypocritus has no clothes and I for one am sick of looking at the corruption dangling from him. He loves taking credit for things he isn't responsible for, like the provincial efforts that reduced greenhouse gases while he is busy trying to raise them. Like his tough on crime stance reducing crime stats, which have been dropping for years, except among his cronies. Like the health of our economy, which is due to good regulations and resources that were in place long before little Stevie came along, and which he would remove and sell off to the lowest bidder. He has done nothing but put Canada backward ten years. Next he'll say that the sunrises because he deregulated it.

What a load of total BS.

Submitted for publication: "Take this message to Ottawa"

Although MP Ron Cannan finally acknowledges that criticism is to be
expected of his government’s responses to unemployment, he continues to
spin the facts (“Labouring to resolve job problem,” August 6).

For example, he reports Canada has recovered more than 765,000 net new
jobs since the recession, and the record is particularly good in relation to youth unemployment.

Agreed, 765,000 is a lot of jobs, but economist Jim Stanford says when
population growth is factored in, “less than one-fifth of the damage
done by the recession has been repaired.” The employment rate remains
lower than it was before the recession, and the youth employment rate
this June was the lowest since 1977.

Cannan also notes the
sunny view of CIBC economists: “the good news is that the Canadian
economy created 155,000 new jobs in the first six months of 2012. The
even better news is that these jobs were of high quality.”

He
leaves out the part where those economists warn that expected job losses
in exports, construction and the public sector add up to a “sure-fire
recipe” for reduced job quality.

Cannan also reports the average weekly wage in May 2012 was $894.61, up 2.5 per cent over the rate one year ago.

That hasn’t even kept up with inflation.

The fact is, the jobs market has been stalled since April; the
unemployment rate fell by 0.1 per cent in June only because 16,800
dropped out of the labour force; there are six to ten unemployed workers
for every job vacancy, depending on which province you’re in; the
unemployment rate for aboriginal Canadians was 12.9 per cent last year;
the unemployment rate was 15.4 per cent in Vernon before seasonal hiring
kicked in; and so many people are hungry in Kelowna, the food bank had
to truck in 25,000 pounds of food from Alberta in June.

Ron
Cannan fiddles while Rome burns. He fiddles when he says the government
has responded to unskilled labour shortages, particularly in the
accommodation and agriculture sectors, by making “improvements” to the
EI program.

In reality, instead of subsidizing wages for such
jobs, the government changed EI rules to force Canadians to take these
dead-end jobs or lose their EI benefits. (The average weekly wage in the
accommodation sector was $366.63 in May 2012, a mere 40 per cent of the
national average weekly wage. The government has enough money to
subsidize the oil and gas industry by $1.38 billion per year, so surely
there’s enough to subsidize jobs such as these.)

Cannan fiddles
when he says the government has also responded to skilled labour
shortages, and done so appropriately through “improvements” to the
Temporary Foreign Worker program and by bringing in the new Accelerated
Labour Market Opinion.

What skilled labour shortages is he
talking about? Perhaps we should look to Alberta, where claims for such
shortages most often arise.

According to the Alberta Federation
of Labour, when a straightforward calculation of demand for labour
minus supply of labour is used, supply exceeds demand for every year
projected through to 2021. There are plenty of workers.

Instead, the government uses “a strange formula” that subtracts the
annual change in demand from the annual change in supply, arriving to
skilled labour shortages for every year to 2021.

Skilled labour
shortages have justified changes to the Temporary Foreign Worker
program that allow foreign workers to be paid up to 15 per cent less
than Canadian workers, thereby driving down wages for all workers.

They have also justified changes to the Labour Market Opinion,
expanding the range of occupations for which employers will not have to
hire and/or train Canadians before turning to lower paid foreign
workers.

I draw two conclusions. First, it’s time to ask just how stupid this government thinks Canadians are.

Second, it’s time for Cannan and his cronies to climb out of the back
pocket of employers and corporations and get cracking. Canadians need
jobs – decent paying jobs – and we need them now.

Canadian
corporations are currently hoarding well over $525 billion in cash
assets, almost one-third the size of the entire economy of the country.
If the government reverses even half of the corporate tax cuts that
result in $46 billion less going into public coffers every year, there
will be plenty of money for job creation.

And if the government pays back the $55 billion it raided from the EI Fund in 2010, there will be plenty for job training, too.

Economists say that $12 billion is what’s needed in the Fund for rainy
days like an economic recession. If the government pays back the Fund,
there will also be enough to accommodate relaxed EI qualification
criteria and extend benefit periods until the required jobs materialize.

It’s time to stop blaming the ‘too-choosey’ unemployed, the ‘greedy’
labour unions and the ‘spendthrift’ Greeks a continent away for the
economic mess in Canada.

It’s the neoliberal agenda of the
Conservative government that’s responsible for the flow of wealth
upward, ever upward, into the hands of the most elite within the private
sector.

Even the Senior Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada
has spoken against rising levels of inequality and said lower- and
middle-income households have borne a disproportionate share of the cost
of the recession and reaped less than their share of the income gains
since then.

Mr. Cannan, please absorb this message and take it back with you to Ottawa.

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About Me

The Pündi are a race from my fantasy novels, the Continuum Chronicles, an exploration of spiritual evolution theory. Appearing like us, they are really child-sized aliens cursed by their own intelligence, trapped as observers unable to share their knowledge. They often develop an individual obsessive interest.

I write and publish, not selling anything, just trying to share ideas that might profit everyone. I aim not for originality but creativity, organizing what exists to generate new associations. I'm a writer with thick glasses and autism, familiar with the struggle for clarity. Novelist, researcher, internet activist, spiritual evolutionist, and process philosopher, I believe in democratic social capitalism with a well-regulated engine of sustainable markets. As a writer, I find that most blockages tend to be improvements trying to occur to me.